AUGUSTINE ON FREEDOM
by Contributing Author, Jacob Enwechter
The
question of what it means to be free is at the heart of every religion and
comprehensive philosophy. The Buddhist system
seeks to avoid suffering through desire and to be released from the cycle of
rebirth. When that release happens, one
is fully free and until then, he must seek to avoid seeking anything with an
inordinate covetousness. The Islamic
faith promotes an unyielding submission to Allah’s will. One must serve and earn his way to paradise
which will ultimately be his freedom.
Judaism waits for the Messiah who will liberate them from their constant
oppressors and establish a geo-political rule on Earth. Until then, Yahweh demands obedience to the
law and the prophets. In philosophy,
freedom has been sought through various thought experiments. It seems the
underlying problem with philosophy that every philosopher knows, is that a given
paradigm for understanding the world is likely to be dismissed shortly after it
is put to the page. There is no
everlasting truth and so freedom would mean finding the ultimate (and
unshakeable) answer to life’s greatest questions. For
any seeker exploring this question of what it means to be free, Saint Augustine
of Hippo offers a most profound rendition of the Christian answer. According to Augustine, freedom is effected
in man when Jesus fixes his broken and enslaved will.
If
one were to step back in a moment of reflection, Augustine would have him
notice that an ineffectual will is indeed an odd and strange element of the
individual’s experience. He expresses
the perplexity inherent to the issue saying, “What is the cause of this
monstrous situation…The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets
resistance…The mind orders the mind to will.
The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it” (Conf. VIII, ix, 21). Why do
humans not perform what their wills desire?
This question is in need of an answer.
Did God make man broken? Was he
drunk when he created the world? What religious
or philosophical system most adequately explains this phenomenon?
Under
the influence of Neo-Platonists, Augustine comes up with a rather philosophical
answer. He sees evil as an absence of
good and this plays into the general problem with man’s will. Stanley Hopper clarifies Augustine’s point in
a chapter of the book, A Companion to the
Study of St. Augustine, saying, “Evil is an unsubstantial negation, and sin
arises solely in the weakness of human wills” (161). From this point of view, man’s weakness is
only the result of a loss of his full potential. This coincides well with the Genesis account
of Adam and Eve and explains man’s imprisoned condition. Augustine concludes, “So the will that
commands is incomplete, and therefore what it commands does not happen. If it were complete, it would not need to
command the will to exist, since it would exist already” (Conf. VIII, ix, 21). From
the nature of willing, he sees that there is something inherently dysfunctional
about man’s volitions.
Further,
he points out what results from a will in conflict with itself. He infers, “The consequence of a distorted
will is passion. By servitude to
passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes
necessity. By these links, as it were,
connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under
restraint” (Conf. VIII, v, 10). If one desires to do good and desires to do
evil, eventually only passion will decide between the unyielding wills. And that passion leads to habits which come
to enslave one against his or her original intentions. This is Augustine’s answer to the question of
what the problem with man is: he is
enslaved to the confusion of his conflicting wills.
Now,
how does one become free of this bondage?
The Buddhist explanation would be that he ought to cease from desiring a
reconciliation of these wills. One must
come to a state of Nirvana where all duality dissolves into the illusion it
supposedly is. On the other hand,
Augustine says that mere thought cannot free the will. Only an act of God’s Spirit and subsequent
response from the enslaved can make one free.
Robert Cushman summarizes this saying,
Augustine perceived in the merely rational
approach to God an internal contradiction:
it cannot reach God because it does not want to have God. It withholds commitment until it has sight;
but it cannot achieve sight until it yields commitment. The rational approach to God does not
perceive that it founders upon the original sinfulness of the human heart (A Companion, 301).
Augustine thought that a commitment
of one’s active life was necessary to reaching a state of provisional
freedom.
Cushman
continues along this train of thought.
He says, “As Augustine will have it, men are born blind in Adam and need
Christ to awaken them. But this is the
only shorthand of his real meaning.
Knowledge of God waits upon re-cognition of God” (A Companion, 305). Freedom
only comes through a spiritual encounter with God where the will is surrendered
to him. Cushman elaborates, “It is not
that reason is impotent or that it is inherently corrupted, but that it is
perverted by the will…Thereby real cognition of God is at the same time the
dissolution of the bondage of the will to self-love.” There is an aspect of “surrendering”
to God in such an interaction with him.
Augustine’s view is said plainly by Cushman “The will is the
problem. The solution was the divine
Visitant and the divine Emancipator. The
Word made flesh, the Mediator, so moves the will that man is enabled to love
the good of which he has been aware without acknowledgement” (A Companion, 306). The implication here is that man is utterly
unable to free himself, but must be “enabled” by the Spirit of God. This is of great concern; for if freedom
means no bondage to one’s will, then how exactly is this accomplished?
Augustine
seems to imply that one’s twisted will makes him responsible before God, but then
only allows God to fix it. If man is
incapable of achieving his own salvation, then why is he judged for the sins of
his ancient ancestor, Adam? Why is he “condemned
already?” Augustine’s own words seem to
betray him because he sees the will as that which makes one responsible, while
positing a supernatural being that “has a grip on” his will. He blames the Devil for his wretched state
saying, “I sighed after such freedom, but was bound not by an iron imposed by
anyone else but by the iron of my own choice.
The enemy had a grip on my will
and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner” (emphasis mine, Conf. VIII, v, 10). He says it was the enemy and his own choice that enslaved him. Therefore, it is not purely his own will
which kept him imprisoned, but the Devil played a role as well. Because of this, only another being which is
more powerful than Augustine and the Devil could free him. In fact, this is exactly how he views his
conversion. In book VIII (xii, 30) he
says that God converted him through the sound of a child saying, “Pick up and
read.” What does this mean that “God’
converted him? Did he not make a
decision to obey?
If
he believes that every human is enslaved to his or her will, then this implies
only another being could free him. If
this is so, then how is he not espousing the kind of gnostic Calvinism that
leads ultimately to fatalism? In his
book, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized,
John M. Rist seeks to dispel the idea that this is Augustine’s view. He writes,
He was not denying that the will is free to
choose. He was asserting that only the
wrong choices are possible unless the will is properly repaired and maintained
by God. Hence, if it chooses badly, it
is nothing but the will that chooses; if it chooses well, the will is
‘prepared’ by God, or, as Augustine eventually puts it, it enjoys full freedom
(summa libertas), freedom being a
condition in which the soul is in harmony with, and subject to, the truth and
the will and love of God (187).
In this interpretation, Augustine
is proposing that the will is enabled to choose the good only by an act of
God. He is not saying that the will must choose the good when it is enabled
by God (i.e. irresistible grace). God
does not force the will to choose, but only enables it.
If
that is his understanding of how freedom is effected then there is great hope
for every man. As the Apostle John said,
Jesus is the light “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” If God’s justice be assumed, then one might
guess that God enables every man to choose the good at some point. Freedom is not found through contemplation,
nor through mere submission to God, but through an act of God enabling the will
to function aright.
This
freedom must be qualified because Augustine sees liberty in this life as provisional. His own conversion was a turning point, not a
complete fix of his broken will. Brown
points this out saying, “The tastes of Augustine’s age demanded a dramatic
story of conversion…No such dramatic experience should delude his readers into
believing that they would so easily cast off their past identity” (171). To be free in this life means to choose the
good as much as the Spirit empowers the will to do so. It is a foretaste of heaven where God’s
presence heals every will in the bond of his love. Concerning Augustine’s writing, Brown
continues, “The amazing Book Ten of the Confessions
is not the affirmation of a cured man:
it is the self-portrait of a convalescent.” Though the convert to Christianity will only
be a convalescent in this life, there remains the most profound and immediate sense
of freedom in acknowledging Jesus Christ.
In
searching through the many answers to the question of what it means for man to
be free, Augustine’s revelation that it means living according to one’s God-inspired
willing, is a profound Christian answer.
Not only does it identify the core problem with every man, but this
answer offers a hope for every man through the sacrifice of Jesus. How many work a daily job under the influence
of other factors that confuse their first will?
How many have murdered, stolen, fornicated, hated, or failed at some task
which was but a result of a conflicted will?
This is slavery as St. Paul wrote in Romans 6:16, “Do you not know that
if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the
one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which
leads to righteousness?” Augustine says
that the unredeemed power to choose is overrated; one can only choose sin. Christ’s Spirit is the only agent that can
free the human soul from its inherent brokenness and return it to the purity it
once possessed in that garden of innocence.
Works
Cited
Augustine. Saint
Augustine’s Confessions. Translated
by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography.
Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University Of California
Press. 2000.
Cushman Robert E. “Chapter XI, Faith And Reason.” in Roy W.
Battenhouse (ed.). A Companion to the Study of St.
Augustine. Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 1979.
Hopper, Stanley. “Chapter VI:
The Anti-Manichean Writings.” in Roy W. Battenhouse (ed.). A Companion to the Study of St.
Augustine. Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 1979.
Rist, John M. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
